I’ve read the entire transcript of Yvette Cooper’s speech to the Labour Party Conference, primarily so that you don’t have to.
It runs to over 1800 words, which makes it three times longer than this piece of commentary. You can thank me later.
In amongst the bog standard and rather nauseating blah, blah, blah, Cooper pledged to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls in a decade.
Whilst at face-value these would appear to be commendable and laudable goals, what she failed to tell her audience of fellow comrades was how these targets are going to be hit. And there’s a reason for this.
If either of those ambitions are to be achieved, it will mean that the police will have to do some very un-Labour like things, and if she’d had the courage to spell those out, she might have found a fair few delegates would have angrily waved rolled up copies of the Guardian in her direction.
They might even have booed. For a start, the police will have to conduct a lot of targeted, intelligence-led stop and search operations.
Most of the teenagers stabbed to death in London in recent years have been black or brown kids, and the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators of those crimes have also been black or brown, so it therefore follows that young people living within communities where these murders are prevalent, will probably find themselves being stopped and searched more than a teenager who lives in an affluent part of low-crime and leafy Surrey.
Good luck to the local police commander who has to explain his officers’ actions to a self-styled, unelected ‘community leader’, from a run-down borough in Central London. Shame you didn’t call upon Conference to support the police during those inevitable meetings Yvette.
The Home Secretary also promised new laws on – take a deep breath – Ninja swords, Anti-social behaviour, Shoplifting, Off-road bikes, assaults on shopworkers, spiking drinks, and online image abuse. Most pragmatic and experienced detectives will tell you that there is already plenty of legislation that cover these crimes, if only there were sufficient numbers of pragmatic and experienced detectives to deal with them.
And if those officers were supported by leaders who had actually done the job, and were blessed with the kind of courage police leaders need, but currently lack, imagine the swift progress that could be made?
Anyway, I digress. The subject of the recent rioting also came up, as you would expect, and whilst Cooper righty condemned those who broke the law, with a straight face, she went on to tell her adoring audience that the riots were, and I quote, ‘nothing to do with immigration.’
Apparently, anyone adversely affected by the rioting had been targeted, ‘because of the colour of their skin.’
It is precisely this type of head-in-the-sand denial of the blatantly obvious, that will simply see disquiet continue to rise among the millions of decent, tax paying, law-abiding citizens of this nation, who are deeply concerned by the levels of illegal immigration into the UK, the rise of radical Islam, and the lack of integration by some communities into British life.
You know these concerned citizens, they’re the kind of people who are wrongly, insultingly, and lazily labelled as being far-right by those who run the country. Yvette Cooper can duck, swerve and dodge the truth all she likes, as can her boss.
Her cabinet colleagues can continue to scrounge and freeload till their hearts’ content, with their ears ringing with the noise from the concerts they attend.
But if they continue in the same manner that has symbolised their first months in power, then their ambitions to halve anything within a decade will be mere poppycock, because they’ll be out on their rear ends at the next General Election.
I wonder if Cabinet know that Kylie is touring the UK next year?